Chris Schluep spent more than a dozen years editing books in New York before moving west. He takes great pride in reading a wide range of books and connecting interested readers with the books they'll love. Chris lives in Seattle with his wife and son, and he feels like he may have one of the best jobs in the world.
Oprah Winfrey talked to best-selling author Ayana Mathis about the most important lessons she learned as a writing student at Iowa. We thought we'd share them with you.
Ayana is the author of the debut novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which was selected by Oprah for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. You can see a review of the book here.
Last week, we posted 2012 book recommendations from popular authors. Since we've received recommendations from so many authors, we decided to do a two-part post. If you'd like to see what the Amazon editors' favorites of the year were, check out the 2012 Best Books of the Year store.
Happy holidays, everyone!
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
"Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel. Mantel’s brilliant fictional account of the deadly war of wills between Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn is so present, so precise that she actually tricks you into thinking you don’t know the ending.”
Two other great books you read this year?
“Gods of Gotham by Lyndsey Faye. One of the most unnerving, entertaining, involving period mysteries I’ve read in years (and I read a lot of period mysteries)."
"Losing Clementine by Ashley Ream. Ream’s novel—about a manic-depressive artist who is planning her own suicide—is poignant and insightful and also surprisingly funny, thanks to its nasty, charming narrator.”
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
”Say You're Sorry by Michael Robotham. 'The Bingham Girls' disappeared three years ago, but their story is far from over. Their fate is gruesome, their courage ennobling. Never-lets-up suspense and beautiful writing."
Two other great books you read this year?
”And When She Was Good by Laura Lippman. Heloise Lane is a single suburban mother who also happens to run a high-priced escort service. When the barrier between her two lives starts to crumble, the results are mesmerizing. Lippman writes with clarity and power.”
“The Good Son by Michael Gruber. Sonia Bailey is part of a 'peace symposium' that is taken prisoner by Muslim extremists in Pakistan. This is a thriller, but also a novel of the mind--I learned more about the radical mindset in these 320 pages than in all the political punditry I've read or watched in the last five years. Highly recommended.”
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
“The Middlesteins by Jami Attenberg. The Middlesteins evokes Leo Tolstoy’s first line of Anna Karenina: 'Every family is unhappy in its own way.' Jami Attenberg's portrait of a family whose matriarch struggles with food addiction is as original as it is heartfelt and accessible. Attenberg’s characters are richly drawn, full of love and despair at the helplessness of keeping a family together when one of their own chooses to literally eat herself to death. The author takes no prisoners and yet she also wisely portrays no villains. These characters stay with you for a long time. I was so enamored with this book, I chose to lend my voice to the audio version.”
Two other great books you read this year?
"Arcadia by Lauren Groff. Lauren Groff’s sumptuous novel chronicles the life of Bit, a boy raised in a commune who witnesses the disintegration of his parents’ generation's utopian dreams. As we follow Bit into adulthood, we experience the extraordinary gifts and scars that such an unconventional childhood leaves. I was so taken with Groff’s extraordinary eye for detail into this strange and dreamy world that I was sure that the author was raised in a commune herself; Turns out she just writes great fiction!."
"Just My Type by Simon Garfield. I have often wondered about the geniuses behind the iconic fonts that the majority of the world takes for granted. Simon Garfield brilliantly anthropomorphizes the fonts and gives us a glimpse into the lives of the artists who created them. My unadulterated fascination with this book is sure to out me as a nerd. I’m okay with that."
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
Two other great books you read this year?
"I also really loved John Barnes’ Losers in Space and D. T. Max’s Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, two books that could hardly be more different but together capture the encouraging breadth of contemporary American literature."
Cameron Diaz:
(Note: Cameron Diaz will be publishing a book in late 2013. It is not yet available on Amazon for preorders.)
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
"We Killed: The Rise of Women in American Comedy by Yael Kohen. This anecdotal history of the women who crack us up and push boundaries is told by the trailblazers themselves as well as TV execs, comedy club owners and everyone who continues that tradition today. You'll learn as much as you laugh."
Two other great books you read this year?
"Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. What an amazing gift Jobs gave the world when he allowed Walter Isaacson to tell the story of his life. This book could almost serve as an instruction manual on how to change the world."
"Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Only through Cormac McCarthy's staggering words can you truly understand the importance of knowing the savageness that man is capable of."
(Note: The Amazon editors selected Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding as the 2011 Best Book of the Year.)
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
"The best book I read this year was Marco Roth's The Scientists, a riveting, soul-baring memoir about the author's relationship with his father, who died of AIDS in the early '90s. It's part mystery, part tragedy, part spiritual and intellectual autobiography. It's beautifully written and as honest as a book can be."
Two other great books you read this year?
"I also loved Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment, an anthology by the art magazine Paper Monument, and How Should a Person Be?, a novel by Sheila Heti."
As the winter and holiday seasons hit their respective strides, the Amazon editors begin to get more requests from friends, family, and customers about what books to read. All the editors have their favorites—you can find them in the 2012 Best Books of the Year store—but we thought it might be interesting to ask some authors what they read and liked this year. After all, wouldn’t it be interesting to know what your favorite author is reading? So in no particular order, here’s a survey from some pretty well-known writers.
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
"The Black Count by Tom Reiss. I never knew anything about Dumas' father before reading this book. His astonishing adventure-filled life became the inspiration for many of his son Alexander's novels, including a prison stay that inspired The Count of Monte Cristo.”
Two other great books you read this year?
“11/22/63 by Stephen King, and Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend by Susan Orlean.”
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
”So many great books in 2012, but I think my favorite is Leigh Bardugo's Shadow and Bone. This debut has such broad appeal it could be enjoyed by middle graders, YA readers and adults alike. Set in an alternative Tsarist Russia where magic and technology clash, an orphaned girl Alina discovers she may hold the key to saving or destroying her country. With great use of Russian mythology, Bardugo crafts a first-rate adventure, a poignant romance and an intriguing mystery all in one book! Fortunately, this is the first of a trilogy."
Two other great books you read this year?
”Only a writer of China Mièville's prodigiously twisted talent could pull off a book like Railsea, a hilarious take on Moby Dick. Imagine a world where islands of solid ground are surrounded by seas of shifting dirt, crisscrossed by a mysterious system of rails. Our hero, Sham ap Soorap, signs aboard the moler train Medes, but soon learns that the captain is obsessed with finding and killing a giant ivory-colored mole Mocker-Jack, who took her arm years before. Things just get stranger and more fun from there. Great adventure for any readers middle grade and up, whether or not you have endured reading Moby Dick!”
“Another brilliant middle grade debut, Geoff Rodkey's Deadweather and Sunrise reads like Pirates of the Caribbean as written by Lemony Snicket. Our young hero Egg Masterson lives a miserable life on an 'ugly fruit' plantation until his father finds a mysterious parchment, which leads Egg on a dangerous quest with plenty of pirates, battles at sea, tricky twists of fate, and a beautiful plucky heroine named Millicent. A great mix of dry humor and good old-fashioned derring-do.”
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
“Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo. The harsh life of a Bombay slum vividly recreated on the page in unusually beautiful prose. Her characters are irresistibly alive. No slumdogs or millionaires here. Just the truth.”
Two other great books you read this year?
"I also strongly recommend Don DeLillo's brilliant fictions in The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, and Christopher Hitchens's last book, Mortality."
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
Two other great books you read this year?
"Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Biting, bitter, exquisitely humorous, characters you won't soon forget."
"Will Schwalbe's The End of Your Life Book Club is a wonderful tribute to both reading and his amazing mother."
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
"Tigers in Red Weather by Lisa Klausmann. An intriguing, epic tale of a New England family. Reminded me of one of my other faves, Mrs. Kimble."
Two other great books you read this year?
"Where Did You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple--a whimsical and funny read. Semple knows how to make her research sound fascinating."
"A Wanted Man by Lee Child--Not much to say other than 'the latest Jack Reacher.' Mr. Child never disappoints."
Best book you read that was published in 2012?
"The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson. The author presents a powerful theory, and one with a strong mathematical backing, namely that we are not single selfish units interested in our genes, rather that we are the products of groups."
Two other great books you read this year?
"Philip Mansel's Levant: Spendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. This is the best book I read this year. It discusses the city states of the Levant (Alexandria, Beirut, Smyrna) with a life of their own, belonging to the Mediterranean not the hinterland."
"Le Rivage des Syrtes by Julien Gracq. A poignant novel, with humans in the grip of expectation, living in the antichamber of hope."
More author recommendations next week.
What books were Amazon customers reading this year? It should come as no surprise that they favored the same books as general readers, which means that our 2012 Top 10 Customer Favorites list comes in multiple shades of grey. You'll find a couple of longtime best-selling authors on the list--John Grisham and David Baldacci--but unlike last year, which featured Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs at #1, as well as books by Tina Fey, Erik Larsen, George RR Martin, Christopher Paolini, and again, John Grisham, there are a lot of lesser-known names on this year's list.
At least they were lesser-known until 2012. William Landay anyone? He wrote a compelling fictional court drama titled Defending Jacob that came out early in the year and took readers (and the Amazon editors) by storm. Then there's Kevin Maurer's No Easy Day, a riveting first-hand account of the author's drive to become a Navy Seal and the experiences he had once he became one, including the successful raid on Osama bin Laden's compound. And of course Gillian Flynn exploded onto the scene with her excellent and popular Gone Girl.
But the real story of 2012 was the rise of romance. And not just any sort of romance--five of the top 10 titles published in 2012 feature a love affair with a young, hot, brilliant billionaire. Call it the Year of the One Percent. Or as our own Sara Nelson put it, "the year of the billionaire bad boy in romance."
Since we only counted print books and ebooks that were originally published in 2012, Fifty Shades Freed, the third book in E.L. James's Fifty Shades Trilogy, lands at the top of our 2012 Customer Favorites list (the first two books in the series came out in 2011). The boxed set of James's trilogy, which was published this year, also earned a spot. Author Sylvia Day takes two slots of her own with Bared to You and Reflected in You, her best-selling romance novels featuring bad boy billionaire Gideon Cross. And Jennifer Probst's The Marriage Bargain, featuring billionaire Nicholas Ryan, introduces yet a third sexy billionaire to the mix.
As I was thinking about this list and comparing it to last year's, it occurred to me that Steve Jobs was a billionaire, too. Maybe he doesn't fall into the same category as Nicholas Ryan, Gideon Cross, and Christian Grey, but it's safe to say that readers have a fascination with the super-rich. This year's crop of best-selling books takes that fascination to a new level.
Perhaps it's not so lonely at the top.
It's safe to say that the world of author Ayana Mathis changed significantly when Oprah Winfrey announced that The Twelve Tribes of Hattie would be the next selection in her Book Club 2.0®. Then the New York Times' own Michiko Kakutani gave Mathis a rave review, something Kakutani doesn't seem normally inclined to do. We got in touch with Mathis to find out what it's like to be Ayana Mathis following all this good news.
Q. Describe Oprah's Book Club 2.0® in one sentence (or, better yet, in 10 words).
A. An impassioned and powerful declaration: Books matter.
Q. What's on your bedside table or Kindle?
A. I'm often reading three or four things at a time, so I invent odd categories to keep them straight. The bedside table is home to read before-bed-but-not-on-the-subway books (heavy hardcovers like Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies), mysteries/thrillers (like Robert Wilson's A Small Death in Lisbon) and things I ought to read but are slooow going (I am now on my fifth month with Augustine's The City of God).
Q. Top three to five favorite books of all time?
A.Very hard to answer! Beloved by Toni Morrison; The Known World by Edward P. Jones; Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson; The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; Cane by Jean Toomer.
Q. Important book you never read?
A. Ulysses. And also Portrait of a Lady, which shames me.
Q. Book that changed your life (or book that made you want to become a writer)?
A. I wrote throughout my childhood and thought I wanted to be a poet, but that was more a fantasy than a goal. I was 15 when someone gave me Sonia Sanchez's, I've Been a Woman—that book was a revolution in my life. I realized that I actually could be a poet, that there were black women who were writing--right then, in that moment.
Q. Memorable author moment?
A. This one? I'm so new to being an author (distinctly different from the solitary enterprise of being a writer) that every moment is unforgettable and stunning.
Q. What talent or superpower would you like to have (not including flight or invisibility)?
A. Anything Wonder Woman can do! Roping bad guys with a lasso of truth, deflecting bullets with my bracelets! Of course, I'd trade all of that for mindreading.
Q. What are you currently stressed about or psyched about?
A. I'm psyched about writing some essays on the nature of faith and belief. Writing essays is a very different process from writing fiction. I'm having a hard time with them, which is incredibly exhilarating and incredibly stressful.
Q. What's your most treasured possession?
A. My grandfather's diaries. He kept them secretly for over fifty years and gave them to me a few years before he died.
Q. Pen envy--book you wish you'd written?
A. Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah or Yusef Komunyakaa's Magic City.
Q. Who's your current author crush?
A. Eudora Welty. There's never a wasted word in her short stories; so much power and meaning packed into a few short pages.
Q. What's your favorite method of procrastination? Temptation? Vice?
A. That's an embarrassingly long list: clothes shopping online, returning clothes I've bought online, cooking elaborate time-consuming dinners, farmer's markets, Netflix Instant (grrr, it's ruining my life).
Q. What do you collect?
A. Ways to procrastinate.
Q. Best piece of fan mail you ever got?
A. Oh dear. I've never gotten any. I'm feeling a little inadequate now.
Q. What's next for you?
A. Trying to find a way into my second novel, the idea is there but the rest isn't. Right now it's a bit like stumbling around in a dark room.
Oprah Winfrey has announced the newest title in her Book Club 2.0®. It's The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by debut novelist Ayana Mathis. Already described by Publishers Weekly as "a gifted and powerful writer," Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.
Watch the video introducing this stunning new author:
For anyone who somehow hasn’t heard of Moning’s books, Dani plays by her own set of rules in a world overrun by Dark Fae, helped by rare talents and the all-powerful Sword of Light. But now, amid pandemonium, her greatest gifts have turned into serious liabilities. Dani’s ex-best friend, MacKayla Lane, wants her dead; the terrifying Unseelie princes have put a price on her head; and Inspector Jayne, the head of the police force, is after her sword and will stop at nothing to get it. What’s more, people are being mysteriously frozen to death all over the city, encased on the spot in sub-zero, icy tableaux. From there, it just gets worse—and more exciting.
According to Moning, in an exclusive interview for Omnivoracious, the biggest difference between the prior novels and Iced is that “the reader gets multiple points of view, rather than experiencing everything through Mac’s eyes. I know some readers will miss having interaction with Mac and Barrons but I’ve got an incredible journey in store for the reader and a lot of great stuff up my sleeve.”
Slate has come out with several features wrapping up the year in books. The lists are all exceptional and clearly have a lot of thought behind them. The Overlooked Books list alone is worth the time--you'll find some more esoteric picks than you normally get in a year-end review. Having recently endured the Herculean (but fun) task of compiling our own Best of the Year lists, it was a joy for the editors at Amazon to read these ones. And that's not always the case.
Slate's 2012 Staff Picks
The Overlooked Books of 2012
Dan Kois' 15 Favorite Books of 2012 (not written by Katherine Boo)
The Slate Book Review Top Ten
They've even included suggestions on How to Wrap an E-book
Karin Slaughter, #1 New York Times best seller and author of Criminal , explains why James Bond is as fascinating today as ever. In many ways, he has his enemies to thank.
James Bond. That short, simple name has come to mean so many things for generations of people. Exotic locations, beautiful women, danger and intrigue. Growing up just outside of Atlanta, I could always count on a James Bond story to take me far away, to transport me to some exotic place that was totally different from anything I saw in my own world. Of course, once James Bond was there, anything could seem exotic. Florida, for instance, is just below Georgia, but when Ian Fleming put 007 in Miami it might as well have been on the other side of the planet.
Or would it? Because Fleming knew something that a lot of other writers don’t. He knew how to take a place and make it real. We see this in Casino Royale, the very first James Bond novel, when we find ourselves in a fading but grand resort in France—something glamorous and removed—but the best food is at a little place near the train station. Or Bond might be in Istanbul, on the hunt for the Soviet agents who attacked the local British spy office, but his adventure would take place in front of a large movie billboard instead of inside some catacomb beneath the Sultan’s palace. That combination would allow us to place ourselves in the middle of not just the action, but the culture of the place. It was distant and exotic, but there was a curtain being pulled back on how the locals live.
The same was true of the villains, those amazing bad guys who have become so familiar that they’re a part of our vocabulary. Blofeld. Dr. No. Le Chiffre. Goldfinger. We know them so well--or is it that we just think we do?
It’s interesting to go back to the source material and see just how different and more interesting these characters are from what we saw on screen. In some ways, they are the larger than life figures we remember. After all, this is James Bond, international secret agent. He’s often got the fate of the world in his hands. But when he first meets Auric Goldfinger, it’s for a far more down to earth reason. A friend of Bond’s thinks a man at his country club is cheating at cards, and asks if Bond could catch him. It’s as simple as that, but it tells us so much about Goldfinger; he’s someone whose greed is so intense that he’ll do anything to get more money. Later, when Bond learns of Goldfinger’s plot to rob Fort Knox of all its gold, we’re moved up into a heightened reality, the reality that we all expect from James Bond, but really Goldfinger isn’t doing anything all that different from what he was doing at the beginning of the novel. He has an unquenchable passion for gold, and it drives his big plans just like it drives the small ones. It’s a common flaw — insatiable greed — made very large.
And then there’s Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the supreme villain in all of Fleming’s Bond stories. He’s a man who works behind the scenes, directing an attempt to blackmail the world with nuclear weapons and striving to destroy England via biological weapons (introduced by unwitting young women, of course; if a modern woman can find one flaw in James Bond, it’s that his women aren’t very modern).; Blodfeld is also the villain who does Bond the greatest harm, murdering his wife and sending him into a downward spiral that nearly ends his career. Blofeld (who doesn’t have a white cat) is an entirely different kind of monster from Goldfinger. He’s not an “ordinary” criminal taken to a great height of villainy. He’s a real demon, a man whose only love, whose only pleasure, appears to be death itself. Though he tries to justify himself, telling Bond that his schemes would have made the world a better place in the end (his nuclear blackmail leading to disarmament, for example), we’re not fooled any more than Bond is fooled. This man had genuinely embraced the darker sides of his soul.
Does this make Blofeld a less compelling villain than someone like Le Chiffre, who has lost his Communist cadre’s accounts in an investment scheme and then desperately tries to win back enough money to hide his activity from his SMERSH masters? Not at all. Instead, it makes Blofeld a different kind of villain. Because there are all manner of dark deeds in the world.
Of course, James Bond is a product of the Cold War, when everyone felt the encroaching fear that there was something unknown threatening us with great harm. But Bond and his villains are more than just stereotypes from old war stories. Fleming didn’t just place his novels in the middle of a superpower confrontation, after all. He knew that there was more going on in the world than just politics. Perhaps this is the one thing that keeps the Bond stories from becoming too dated—as outlandish as the locations and storylines can be, they were still grounded in a familiar reality. Blofeld is scary because he embodies the unknown. And when Bond finally beats him, strangling him in a wave of fury, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. At the end of the day, it’s possible for the heroes to defeat the bad guys.
That simple formula is why James Bond endures. The antagonists, those memorable villains whom Bond has to outwit in order to protect the world, embody the worst traits that we all see around us all the time. Some of these transgressions are ordinary human failings, the greed and ambition which can cause people we know to act like monsters. Sometimes they’re the faces of darker fears, childhood nightmares which we as grown ups might have forced down but haven’t quite managed to banish completely. They bring us a chill of recognition, then a thrill of relief when they’re defeated. That relief might be even greater when it’s Fleming’s Bond, the hero on which we can project our dreams, the shark that keeps moving forward no matter how much blood is in the water.
--Karin Slaughter
